The rank and file of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), from Delhi and Punjab, hit the streets of the national capital in protest against the questioning of AAP national convener and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in connection with the alleged liquor scam at the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) headquarters on Sunday.
The allegation that the Delhi government’s now-scrapped 2021-22 excise policy favoured certain dealers led to an investigation by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The CBI headquarters, where the CM was questioned for over nine hours, was turned into a fortress, with multiple layers of barricading and a heavy deployment of police and paramilitary personnel.
At least 1,350 AAP leaders and workers were detained during the protests, the police said.
The detainees, including Rajya Sabha members Sanjay Singh and Raghav Chadha, Delhi Ministers Kailash Gahlot, Saurabh Bharadwaj and Atishi, Punjab Minister Harjot Singh Bains and AAP national general secretary Sandeep Pathak, were released later in the evening.
The police started rounding up AAP leaders soon after Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann, who reached the CBI headquarters with Mr. Kejriwal around 11 a.m., left the area around 2:45 p.m.
Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Singh said the AAP chief had been called for questioning by the CBI “out of frustration” after he had spoken on the Modi-Adani issue in the Delhi Assembly.
“Nothing will come out of this investigation because there has been no scam. They [BJP] want to crush Kejriwal because we have now become a national party,” he added.
After he was detained, Mr. Chadha, in a tweet, said the BJP is suffering from “Kejriwal-phobia” and wants to “crush AAP” as “there is nobody left in the country to challenge them.”
Counter-protest
Earlier in the day, leaders of the BJP staged a sit-in at Raj Ghat protesting against some AAP MLAs for comparing the AAP chief with Mahatma Gandhi and “insulting the father of the nation”.
Leading the protest, Delhi BJP chief Virendra Sachdeva said, “The day Kejriwal gets trapped, he remembers Mahatma Gandhi; otherwise, he has even removed Gandhi’s portrait from the Secretariat.”
